John 3:16
“… that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

I was serving the Lawrence Memorial United Methodist Church in Pepperell, Massachusetts and the parsonage was literally in the parking lot of the church.  I had one neighbor on the other side of the parking lot as you came up the driveway from the street.  The family that lived there included a man, his wife, and a young teenage son.  They also rented an apartment on the second floor of their house.  I knew that they attended some variety of Baptist Church in town.

One day, after I had been living there for about a year and a half, I was busy working in my office in the parsonage when the man rang my doorbell.  I answered the door, wondering what he wanted.  He said hello, and then said he wanted to ask me a question.  I said okay.  Then he asked, “Do you know if you’re saved?”  It took me a moment to actually comprehend what he had said, because it wasn’t something I expected to hear.  I was stunned by the question.  Finally I managed to respond, “You do know that I’m the pastor of the church here?”  He wasn’t going to be deterred that easily.  He said, “Yes, but are you sure you’re going to heaven when you die?”  At that point, I knew that any further discussion was only going to make me angry, so I said, “I think this conversation is over.”  I closed the door and went back inside.

There are a lot of different understandings of what it means to be “saved.”  There are lot of different perspectives on who is going to be going to heaven.  This man’s theology put him squarely in the camp of those who would be described as believing in exclusivism or particularism.  They are at the most conservative end of the spectrum and believe, at the least, that the only people who are will be in heaven are those who have personally accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.  Some are even more exclusive than that.  They believe that only people who are members of a particular denomination will go to heaven; or that only people of a particular congregation will go to heaven. 

Max Lucado, the author of 3:16 The Numbers of Hope, is an exclusivist, in the sense that he strongly believes that only those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior will go to heaven when they die; only Christians will be “saved.”  While he affirms that “whoever” believes in Jesus will be saved, no matter what they’ve done, no matter where they are, no matter when they come to Christ, he allows no room for believers of other faiths to be right with God.  He points to verses like John 14:6, where Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” (RSV)  And he reminds us that the apostles seem to concur with this in their preaching, such as when Peter states in Acts 4:12, “There is salvation in no one else!  God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.” (NLT)  And Lucado asks, “How can all religions lead to God when they are so different?”

At the other extreme from exclusivism are those who believe in universalism; that is, they believe that all people will eventually be welcomed into heaven.  One example of a believer in universal salvation is William Barclay, who wrote a series of commentaries that I use, despite my disagreement with him on this point.  For universalists, they cannot believe that a loving God would allow anyone to spend eternity in hell, and so they believe that God must provide some way for all persons to be saved in the end, even after death if necessary.

I am not comfortable with either exclusivism or universalism.  I have found myself resonating with a middle way, which Adam Hamilton refers to as inclusivism in his book, Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White.  In this book, he has a chapter on the question of whether there will be persons of other faiths, such as Jews and Muslims, in heaven.  Some examples of others who hold the inclusivist view are John Wesley and C. S. Lewis.

Hamilton writes:  There are hundreds of millions of people who long to know God, who follow him according to what they know of his will, who pray daily to him … and who earnestly seek to please God by doing what is just and right.  We say that God forms such persons in their mothers’ wombs, knows them by name, loves them, sees and hears every prayer they utter, and surely sees their attempts to do what is right as they understand it.  Is it really the gospel truth that God then stands by and watches as they perish?  Not only so, but must we believe as Christians that God has designed an eternal punishment – a torment – for them, because, though they sought God, they did not understand that Jesus is the Christ and they did not call upon him for salvation?  This I find incomprehensible and completely out of character for a God whose defining characteristic, according to the Scriptures, is love, and whose secondary characteristics are justice and righteousness.  Thus, Adam Hamilton, and I also, have a problem with the exclusivist perspective on salvation.

But on the other hand, neither of us can accept the universalist view either.  As Hamilton puts it:  On the converse side, there are hundreds of millions of people who have, their entire lives, resisted God’s will, who have not lived lives of love, who have not valued justice or mercy, and who lived lives in which they were the center of their existence .. The only way they could enter heaven would be if God removed their freedom to choose or reject him.  This I don’t see God doing … I see two choices for such persons.  Either their lives are snuffed out, as many believe will happen.  They could have had eternal life, but instead they are eternally separated from God through a final death.  Or they are allowed to go to a place where all of those souls who wish to live primarily for themselves, and who resist God and goodness go.  That makes sense to me.

But how do you answer the question about the destiny of Jews, Muslims, and people of other faiths being in heaven?  Is there a Biblical basis for that?  Adam Hamilton points out the consistent theme in scripture of God’s concern for all of humankind.  God created Adam and Eve, from whom all people descended.  After the flood, God made a covenant with all of humanity.  God promised that all nations would be blessed through Abraham.  God promised Hagar that her son Ishmael would be made into a great nation.  Rahab, a Canaanite, and Ruth, a Moabite, are considered heroes, even though they are not Jews.  God frequently mentions his desire for the nations to come to him.  Cyrus, the Persian king, is referred to as God’s anointed one, or “Messiah” in the book of Isaiah.  The book of Jonah shows God’s concern for the people of Nineveh, which was the capital of Assyria, an enemy of Israel.  Jesus came to bring salvation to all people, including the Gentiles.  The first people to welcome and honor Christ in the book of Matthew were the Magi, astrologers from Persia who most likely were followers of Zoroaster.  And according to Romans 1:20, all human beings have access to some knowledge of God through the created world.  And so we can see a clear pattern in the Bible of God’s interest in all people, not just the Jews, and not just the Christians.

Adam Hamilton asks us to consider a woman who is a faithful Jew or Muslim.  She is sincere in her faith and wants to have a relationship with God and does her best to live according to the demands of God as she understands them.  She prays, studies, helps the poor, serves others, gives sacrificially, and loves God.  She is not likely to convert and is not persuaded that Christianity is the truth.  Hamilton writes, “I believe that God, who is just and loving, sees this woman’s heart.  I also believe that it is by God’s grace alone that she has sought God in her religion.  I believe that God accepts what the person knows to bring, and that it is possible that she will be saved.  All that she has brought to God is trust, which is all that any of us bring to God.  And in her response to her trust, she has sought to live according to God’s precepts, as she understood them, which is what we have sought to do.”

So how can that work?  How can we make sense of that, and still take seriously the words of Jesus?

If I understand the way of inclusivism correctly, it works like this.  Jesus Christ died for everyone, whether or not everyone believes in him.  And God can choose to apply the saving work of Jesus on the cross to anyone God chooses to apply it to.  God can give the gift of salvation to anyone God chooses to give it to.  God can choose to give that gift to someone of another faith who has sought God, loved God, and responded to God’s love in the only ways that the person knew how to do it.  Adam Hamilton says, If God chooses to save anyone, including the Hindu, Muslim, or Jew, I believe it will only be by means of the saving work of Jesus – hence no Hindu, Muslim, or Jew would enter the kingdom of heaven except by the work of Christ, even if they did not know to call upon that work.  In other words, no one comes to the Father but by him.

I realize that this is a difficult concept to grasp, and it may be a new concept for some of you to think about.  I have often puzzled over this question, ever since I was in the Brownie Scouts with a Jewish girl, Alisa.  As we grew up together, I could not believe that the God I had been taught to believe in – a God who loved me and who loved everyone – would send Alisa to hell just because she was Jewish.  Somehow, even as a youngster, I had this thought that God must have made some way for Alisa to be in heaven when she died.  She was Jewish because her parents were Jewish and brought her up to be Jewish, just the same as I was Baptist because my parents were Baptist and brought me up to be Baptist.  Why would one of us go to heaven and the other go to hell when we both believed in the same God?  After all, we shared the books of the Old Testament!

“Whoever believes” will not perish, but have eternal life.  My understanding of “whoever believes” is bigger than Max Lucado’s.  It is more inclusive.  Maybe I’m wrong.  But in my heart, this is what I can live with.  And after all, if I can trust God to judge me and my life, then I can trust God to judge every other person’s life.